It gets harder when what you’re teaching has a bad reputation, and so you need to help people shift their perspective on it, to find the good, as Jen says.

It gets even more challenging when survival is at stake, when people are worried about making just making it. Survival causes people to tighten up, to want to rest into what’s already known instead of learning something new.

This is why teaching business skills to people who really care about their work can be so challenging. I’ve been teaching for more than twenty years in a variety of fields, including emergency medicine, computer science, nonprofit fundraising, spiritual healing and for the last ten years business skills for the self-employed and micro businesses. That spans practical hands-on knowledge, theoretical knowledge, and emotional/spiritual experiences.

Labels and Teaching

Charlie Gilkey, his partner Angela Wheeler, my collaborator and our operations chief Kate Wiliams and her partner Nancy were over our place for dinner the other night, and a topic that surfaced was labels. Specifically what people in our field of work call ourselves.

Charlie bounces back and forth between consultant, coach, and philosopher depending on the audience, among other things.

I’ve been avoiding using a label for years, because it doesn’t always feel useful. People often call me a “coach” even though I have no formal coach training, and my friend Molly Gordon who certifies coaches for ICF tells me I would pass their master coach certification with flying colors.

I’ve had extensive training in spiritual healing, but there’s trouble with calling yourself a “healer” when truly healing originates within. One can be a catalyst for healing, I can facilitate a healing process, but I can’t actually heal anyone.

The label I know that Kate, my wife Holly and I all resonate with strongly resonate with is “teacher.” Kate has been a director at the National College of Natural Medicine. Jason Stein, one of our practitioners, is a dean at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. We are all about education.

But because of my paramedic past, because of our team’s past history with medicine, the education we’re into is practical, hands-on, implementable, usable stuff. Before almost anything else, I was a paramedic Field Training Officer and preceptor- which means I took brand-spanking new paramedics out of school, and mentored, “precepted” them into become street-wise medics who could actually perform on the job.

This is a tremendous strength of ours at Heart of Business. And yet, there are things that have been learned about the human brain that continue to amaze us.

For instance, the human brain has a really hard time learning and thinking. We want to learn, we love learning, but we can only do it well under certain conditions. Change those conditions and we can’t learn. For instance, make a goal a little bit too hard, a little bit out of reach and the brain shuts down and wants to do something easier.

But make it too easy? We get bored and give up.

Enter Instructional Design

One of our team members, Judy Murdoch, the insightful Dick Carlson of Techherding.com, @juliemargretta at Harvard, among others, have helped us learn about instructional design. What I’ve gathered from a lot of reading and conversations is that instructional design is a simple concept: pay attention to how you design your trainings and people can learn. It involves being clear about what you want people to learn and assessing whether they learn it. It involves designing environments, exercises and interactions that facilitate learning.

It’s incredibly important and it’s something that is nearly entirely ignored in the field of small business training. We’re getting on board ourselves.

Changes to Opening the Moneyflow 2011

This is the major reason we’re changing the format of Opening the Moneyflow 2011. Yes, many of the participants were overjoyed at what they learned this past year. And some weren’t as happy.

The reason? We followed the pack and made a large training. We had three trainers and sixty students, so we figured we had a good ratio of one person to twenty students, and as a group we could back each other up.

It worked. And there were challenges. One big challenge is that in a group of sixty people, there were many different needs. We were trying to catch a balance between caring for people and making it affordable.

This leads to the changes we’re making.

Change Number One: Three different levels.
People need different things, so we’re created different levels. One level is a DIY level with a bare-budget price. One level is small group work, no more than six people, with one of our practitioners. And one level is intensive combination of individual one-on-one work and group work in a small group of no more than eight with me, Mark.

Change Number Two: Class Time is For Transformation and Learning
Instead of me teaching the content in the classes, we’re going to be offering the content in a combination of recorded audio and PDFs. Group time won’t be lectures, it will be discussion, strategizing, healing, implementation.

Change Number Three: Assessments and Study Plans
Each person who joins will take a detailed assessment of their business, so we can create a personalized study plan with you. You won’t just follow a curriculum as part of a group. Instead we’ll take a look at where your business is, your strengths and weakenesses, your struggles and successes, and we’ll plot a plan for you to move forward.

Change Number Four: Understanding Personality Differences
We’re a big fan of the Enneagram over here, and Kate Williams is undergoing an intense training to learn even more than she already knows. If you’re not familiar with it, the Enneagram is a typing system, like Myers-Briggs for instance, and it is very subtle and complex, with many nuances to it. It doesn’t put anyone in a box, but it does help us identify how we relate to the world around us.

Each participant, if they choose, will get an understanding of themselves through the Enneagram system, which will help further personalize the learning experience, help us as teachers work with you in ways that you learn best, and even help you understand your relationship to spirituality at a deeper level.

What Won’t Change: The Heart and Spirit of What We Do

We’re dedicated to implementing these practical pieces around learning and instructional design so that we can help people totally transform their businesses.

And we’re going to be delivering it in the same heart-felt container we always do. I am personally involved in a Masters of Divinity program in Spiritual Ministry and Sufi Studies with my Sufi teachers, deepening my understanding of our relationship between the Divine and the physical world. At the same time that we’re heightening our educational efforts, we’re deepening our spiritual presence.

Our goal? To have you know deeply that every act of business can be an act of love, and that your business can thrive in making a difference and being effective.

Although the total number of spots won’t be any less, there will still be room for about sixty participants, more than half of those will be at the bare-bones level.

If you want one of the interactive, small group spots, there will only be 26 of those. 18 in three small groups of six with our practitioners, and eight more spots in a small group with me.

I wanted to be open about our learning process and some of the changes. And I wanted to collect my thoughts as I start this second day of organizing the sales page. I hope it’s helpful.

Now, how to get all of this information, and more, available on an easy-to-read sales page. Hmmm…

This article was actually first published back in June of last year. My family is on vacation, first visiting the birth parents of our adopted twin boys, and then off to my sister’s where our larger family goes every year to celebrate Thanksgiving.

In preparing to be out of town for that long with twin toddlers, I just didn’t get the article written. But I wanted to have you take another look at this particular article because as the holidays approach, many heart-centered business folks don’t feel very celebratory. Why not?

Clients go on vacation, and the feast or famine cycle of your business falls on the famine side of things. The approach I describe below tells you how your clients really want to help you smooth out your cash flow, if only you don’t abandon them.

For even more info on money flow, momentum and such, don’t forget to join me for the no-cost teleclass December 2. Yes, it’s a bit of a promotion for our Opening the Moneyflow course, but I’m going to be explaining why we planned our year-long program the way we did, and how that applies to moving your business into momentum. How do you take a full year and use it in a way that moves your business towards momentum?

Click here to register for the teleclass. Then read the article below. And enjoy this coming weekend, whether or not it’s a holiday for you. Even if experiencing challenges, I’m imagining there’s also a lot to be grateful for in your life and business.

Smoothing Cash flow When Your Business Is Small or New

A past participant in the Opening the Moneyflow Course had a fairly minimal email list of potential clients, about 80 or so. It was enough to bring in a few clients, but not enough to keep her pipeline full.

While she was ramping up to increase the list, which was growing every week, she was still facing that cash flow issue: how can you keep a steady cash flow with just a handful of clients, before your marketing gets traction?

When the Last Session Approaches

Despite my Virgo-ness, my office needed big time help, which is why I hired someone to help me get organized. In the first four sessions of a five-session package, things changed in leaps and bounds. Big leaps. Huge bounds. I was ecstatic.

“Well, next session is our last session,” she told me. “Whatever you want is okay with me, whether you want to stop or continue.”

Suddenly, I felt nervous, a little unsure. Was she trying to get rid of me politely? Was she expecting me to able to handle it all on my own now?

Instead of disappearing on her after our last session, I asked her for a prescription: “Based on what you know about me and our work together so far, what do you recommend in terms of sessions or whatever so I can come to some completion?”

Pause. “Well, based on what you still want to do, you won’t be done by the next session. And it looks like you’re responding really well to what we’ve been doing together. You’ve made huge progress. I think you should strongly consider continuing after the fifth session. Next time we meet, I’ll let you know how many additional sessions I recommend, based on what is still left undone.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t have to figure it out on my own. She wasn’t trying to drop me, and she wasn’t going to abandon me in the middle of the work.

Whew!

Freedom Can Scare a Client and Destroy Your Cash Flow

Whether you’re a coach, healer, chiropractor, or some other service provider, it’s not uncommon when you’re new in business to use some sort of introductory package that consists of just three or five sessions. It’s a great idea and can help uncertain clients jump in, because the commitment isn’t so large.

The problem, however, with these packages is that clients can zip through them in a month or so. You’re then left with having to find new clients. Because you don’t have a steady flow of clients coming through your pipeline, you can’t trust that you’ll have the mortgage or grocery money from month to month.

Not fun.

And look what it does to your clients. Whatever kind of service you provide, it’s going to be a rare client that is going to have gone as far as they can go with you in just three to five sessions. The vast majority are going to need more.

If, on the last session, you say something like, “Whatever you want is okay with me”…. well, you saw my reaction. I’m willing to bet that most of your clients are not going to be proactive and ask for a prescription.

Your clients are not going to be so brave. They’ll just leave.

They won’t feel complete, and you’re left with an open client slot. Lose-lose. Yucko. Instead, it’s best for both of you if you guide them. You have to sell ‘em, but not the hard sell.

Avoiding the Hard Sell

Once someone has signed up as your client, they are depending on you. They are looking to you for care and guidance.

You can, of course, betray that trust by telling them to spend money with you in wasteful or unnecessary ways, and there are plenty of examples of people who do that.

But you’re a heart-centered person and you truly want what’s best for them, which is why you told them, “Whatever you want is fine with me,” in the first place.

Don’t do that. Stand even more clearly in your heart, and tell them what they really need.

Even My Sufi Sheikh Does It To Me

Before I had formally been initiated by my spiritual teacher (called “taking hand” in the Sufi tradition), there was a lot of gentleness, permission, and exploration with the teachings.

But once I had “taken hand” and made the agreement to be his spiritual student ( murid), things changed. As his murid, I made a promise to do certain things. And now every time I see him, he gives me more prescriptions on how to walk on the spiritual path.

It’s a given that I am free to do whatever I want to do. If I choose to ignore him, I can. But I’ve made a commitment to be his student, so I listen. And (for the most part) I do what he tells me. Because he’s my teacher, I trust him, and he’s never yet steered me wrong.

Of course, you may not be a grand poobah, or a high muckety-muck. You’re just you. And yet, your clients are still your students, effectively. Steer them. Guide them.

If you don’t, they probably won’t feel free, they’ll feel abandoned.

Yet, I understand that it can seem like a fine line between steering and bullying them. Walking that line isn’t as hard as you might think, however, if your heart is in the right place.

Keys to Steering Your Clients

• What is truly in their best interest?

If they truly are complete, let them go. Though, if you can see more for them, don’t shy away from acknowledging that.

Take a moment in your heart, pick one of your clients, and ask to be shown what’s still possible if they continue receiving your support past the intro package. Let yourself be willing to be surprised.

• Be creative about the format.

After the intro package, there may or may not be a change in order. Again, for your client, ask your heart what the format would be for them to achieve optimum results.Consider length of time, and number and frequency of sessions. Also consider other types of support.

Write it all down and say “yes” to it.

• Present it as a package.

Don’t string clients along session by session if you can help it. You don’t want each new session to be a new purchasing decision, because it keeps the client from resting into the larger flow of the work you are doing together.

Show them what your heart showed you: “When I took some time to think it through, here’s what I got: you could use another eight sessions, two a month instead of the intensive weekly sessions we’ve been doing up until now, over the next four months. How does that sound?”

If it came from your heart, chances are it will resonate with their heart, too. And even if it doesn’t, you can negotiate together the best course to take.

Take care not to give your clients so much freedom that they feel abandoned. If you keep the container in tact, you’ll see them achieve more and sticking around longer. This helps them, while smoothing out your cash flow so you can focus and take the time you need to get the word out to more people.

p.s. Time’s running out to jump into the 2010 Opening the Moneyflow course.

There are lots of tidbits like this one that help to tweak your business along and get it running smoothly. If you try to jam them all into a typical six week course, how many of them would you really be able to implement and see results?

Join me and the Heart of Business team for an entire year of learning, feedback, community, love and support to move your business into momentum. What if you could trust your business to keep bringing in income every month? What if you you didn’t have to do anything weird or smarmy to make it work?

The early bird deadline to save five hundred dollars is December 4. Read, check in with your heart, and then get your application in:

Opening the Moneyflow year-long course.

Join us for the free preview teleclass on December 2.

It seems a few people were feeling like they were in that club yet not really wanting to belong to that “in-crowd.” As a community, we all took a look at one person’s offer and started to point out where we lost interest, got bored, or where it just didn’t make sense.

Kinda nice, eh, to have that kind of feedback? Usually when you put an offer out there, it’s just deafening silence. But because of the knowledgeable, open-heartedness of the Business Oasis members, she got lots of feedback.

(Note: The Business Oasis online community is no longer available.)

What Is Boredom?

Boredom is lots of things, but one of those things may surprise you: Boredom is actually a symptom of overwhelm. But not the overwhelm of too many things to do.

Boredom often sets in when you are overwhelmed by too many things to feel, sometimes uncomfortable feelings, and because they are unconscious or not socially acceptable, you have no place to express them or get the underlying needs addressed.

Boredom actually expresses itself as a “cabin-fever” anxiety that can motivate people to go somewhere else. As in, away from your writing, your offer, and your business. But, when you give your reader space for these emotions and needs, they can stay put, and engaged with what you’re writing.

So let’s take a look at three places where you can get caught boring people.

Boring Thing Number One: Talking to a Group

You tawkin’ ta me? You tawkin’ ta me? I hope so. Because if you ain’t tawkin’ to me, you ain’t tawkin’ to nobody.

It’s surprisingly easy to not talk to someone. And it happens when you slowly slip into thinking you’re talking to more than one person. That’s all, just believe you’re talking to two, or ten, or a thousand people instead of one, and suddenly your language becomes less focused, less intimate, less connected.

Why does this happen? Well, when it’s just you and me, you might take risks with language that you might not take in a group. You might say to me: “Gawd! When your client did that, that must’ve felt like cr@p!”

Then you notice other people are listening. Important people. People who you want to like you. Maybe some of them have checkbooks and credit cards who might actually pay you (although you don’t like thinking like that.)

You straighten yourself up, clear your throat, and suddenly you’re saying: “That is . . ., what I meant to say was . . ., I offer my most sincere empathy to you dear colleague on that unfortunate incident with your client . . .” Snore.

Talk to your one reader. Just one reader, and give it to them straight.

Boring Thing Number Two: Talking About Yourself

It’s a totally sane, reasonable assumption that if you are making an offer that you want to write about that offer. Unfortunately, what is sane and reasonable is also dead wrong and dead boring.

Pssst… just between you and me, I’ll tell you a secret: I want to talk about myself. I want you to talk about me. It’s not because I’m self-centered, it’s because my heart is deeply longing for witnessing, to be seen and known.

If you talk about your offer first and in great detail, your reader can’t hear you. “Boring” may not be exactly it, but they can’t keep their attention on it, because they don’t have listening space.

What you want to talk about is them–who they are, what they like, what they are struggling with. Once you do that sufficiently, they’ll be able to listen to your offer. Especially if your offer is relevant to helping solve whatever they are struggling with.

Quick story: I was sick. Really sick. I was canceling a training we were supposed to do for a holistic clinic here in Portland, and David, the owner of the clinic, said: “Wow, you sound really sick? What’s wrong?” We talked about me being sick for a few minutes. He said, “You should come for an appointment.” With who, I asked? He recommended one of his practitioners. I made an appointment.

I walked into her office without even knowing what she does. I mean, was she a naturopathic physician, acupuncturist, reiki master, what? All I knew was that David knew how sick I was and told me she could handle it. And she did.

Boring Thing Number Three: Losing the Thread of the Main Problem

I was reading some of the Alternet news articles the other day–reading from article to article, one problem after another that I cared about–global warming, the Iraq war, conflict in the Holy lands, poverty and homelessness…

Yup, overwhelm. I stopped reading. Not because I don’t care, but because too many uncomfortable emotions were coming up, and I was feeling helpless. Overwhelmed. That stir-crazy-cabin-fever boredom-overwhelm that moved me along to something more pleasant.

Now, listen. I know that your offer can solve multiple problems. But in order not to overwhelm and bore people, pick the one biggest problem and focus on it as you write.

Yes, you can mention other problems the offer solves, but as additional bonus benefits. Keep the thread of just one problem, and people will follow the trail to the end.

Bored Readers Don’t Buy

You are wanting to help people–sometimes with really serious issues! Receiving that help takes a great deal of trust on their part. Trust that is built when they think there is acceptance and understanding for who they are and what they are struggling with.

By catching and not using these three elements: talking to more than one person, talking about yourself, and focusing on more than one problem–you’ll be inviting them in, connecting with them, and removing huge pieces of boredom from your offers.